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Wherever-the-Fuck Ontario, a few years after The Long Game
Ilya grabbed the sheets and dug his fingers into Shane’s shoulder hard enough that it hurt, so Shane slowly pulled his mouth off his dick, pushing his tongue into the slit.
“What the fuck,” Ilya gasped. “What are you doing, put your mouth back—”
Shane obliged, sort of, and flattened his tongue against the underside of Ilya’s cock, licking a slow stripe up as he rubbed his fingertips over Ilya’s prostate, two fingers sunk knuckle-deep, and Ilya abruptly broke into Russian swearing.
Shane grinned and sucked a ball into his mouth, which got a fuck! peppered into all the Russian, mostly too fast and nonsensical for Shane to follow. He just closed his eyes and let it wash over him, feeling Ilya come apart.
And fuck, he loved this. He loved knowing how to wring every desperate, broken noise out of Ilya. He loved the heady sense of control it gave him, hearing Ilya say his name like it was a prayer. He loved being here, at the cabin, with absolutely nothing to do but edge Ilya until his thighs trembled.
Shane pulled his mouth off again and this time Ilya whimpered, twisting, his head to one side in the pillow as he ground down onto Shane’s fingers, out of his mind. A shaking, sweating, beautiful mess. Shane stared, fingers working slowly, trying to drink in every single detail of this.
“Shane,” Ilya said. He sounded like he’d run a marathon. “I am going to fucking die if you do not—”
He cut off when Shane pressed his tongue to the underside of his cock and pushed his lips over the head slowly, letting it rub against the roof of his mouth. Ilya’s fingers threaded into his hair as he gasped, hips jerking, before Shane pulled off again with a long, slow lick.
“Shane,” Ilya breathed, desperate.
“You love it,” Shane said, and slid his mouth all the way down. Ilya’s hips bucked up helplessly, fucking into Shane’s mouth and grinding against his fingers all at once, and then he choked out something in Russian and said fuck, fuck, fuck, Shane and came down his throat, clenching so hard on his fingers Shane couldn’t move them. He swallowed again and again, blissful, basking in it until Ilya was going soft in his mouth and tugging on his hair. Ilya gasped a little when he pulled his fingers out and hauled him up the bed and then they were kissing, deep and lazy and sated.
“I love summer,” Ilya said when he’d recovered, lying on his side, Shane tucked under his chin, pressing slow, lazy kisses to the hollow of his throat.
“You love summer?” Shane could hear Ilya’s smile, so he nipped at a collarbone.
“Ow! What else am I supposed to love if you are going to bite me?”
“How do you talk so much?” Shane mumbled, but he pressed a kiss to the spot.
“I love you even more than I love summer, moy—"
“If you say vacuum cleaner I’ll kick you out of bed.”
“—serdityy kotenok.”
Shane huffed against Ilya’s throat, but he also secretly liked that one and Ilya knew it, so he rolled onto his back and pulled Ilya on top of him. Rain lashed against the floor-to-ceiling windows, dark clouds roiling over the lake. Shane had a vague recollection of hearing thunder at some point, but couldn’t be particularly bothered to care. Not when Ilya was half-asleep on top of him, warm and sated as he found Shane’s hand with his and laced their fingers together. He’d almost drifted off when Ilya spoke again, his voice a deep, soft rumble in Shane’s ear.
“I want you to fuck me,” he said, and Shane’s eyes snapped open.
“What?” he said, after a moment.
Ilya rolled onto his side and smirked. “I want you to fuck me,” he said again.
“Now?” Shane said stupidly. He wasn’t panicking, just—surprised.
“Not now, my body is made of jello,” Ilya said, which Shane felt pretty smug about. “Sometime. Later.”
Shane considered this for a moment, watching Ilya’s face from six inches away: curls sweaty, cheeks still faintly pink, eyes as sparkly as ever.
“You didn’t like it the last time we tried it,” he said.
Ilya gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Was years ago. Maybe it is an acquired taste, like licorice.”
“You also don’t like licorice,” Shane pointed out.
“Yes, but I keep trying it because Luca likes it so much.”
“And then you make a face and tell him how awful it is.”
“When have I ever told you your dick is awful? I am its number one fan.”
Shane snorted.
“I should get one of those big squishy hands,” Ilya went on, and Shane didn’t follow that, either.
“What?” he asked again, when it was clear Ilya wasn’t going to explain without prompting.
“You know, to hold up and cheer,” Ilya said, waving a hand in the air like that helped.
It didn’t. Shane’s brain felt like it was on a three-second delay, sex-dumb and sleepy, not to mention he’d pretty much turned it off yesterday when they’d gotten to the cabin. So no, he had no idea why Ilya wanted to get his dick a squishy hand to cheer with, or something.
Ilya sighed, like Shane was the one being ridiculous. “People have them at games, Hollander. They say things like ‘Go Centaurs’ or ‘Ilya Rozanov is the greatest’?”
Belatedly, a light went on in Shane’s brain.
“Foam fingers,” he said. “You mean foam fingers.”
“Yes! I will get a foam finger that says ‘I love Shane Hollander’s dick.’”
Shane sighed and threw a leg over Ilya’s thighs, a gust of wind splattering more rain against the windows. He was pretty sure he never wanted to move again, because everything was too perfect like this: in bed with his husband somewhere they could have all the curtains open and not worry about a dickhead with a telephoto lens, with absolutely nothing to do but lie there and bicker about foam fingers.
“You can’t wave it at games,” he said.
“What if you get a hat trick?”
“Still no.”
“Two hat tricks.”
Shane yawned and curled against Ilya, smashing his face into his shoulder.
“We’ll see,” he said, and Ilya kissed the top of his head.
———
When, in the space of about six months, they’d gone from secretly engaged to publicly out, married, and playing for the same team, Shane had done some freaking out that Ilya would take it as an invitation to be wildly inappropriate all the time. He’d done a lot of freaking out about a lot of things, actually, but since his husband had no shame and loved attention, that had been in the top five.
“You think I will embarrass you?” Ilya had said when Shane brought it up, so, maybe he hadn’t been the most tactful.
“You embarrass me in front of Hayden all the time.”
“Yes. Is Hayden. When have I embarrassed you in front of someone who matters?”
Shane didn’t answer right away, because, okay, Ilya had a point. He had technically embarrassed Shane in front of his parents plenty of times, but it was always by being disgustingly sappy and sweet, not by bragging about how fast he could make Shane come. He even kept the PDA to holding hands and chaste kisses.
“Look. Just don’t, please, okay?”
“Sweetheart. I would never.”
And he hadn’t. The first time a reporter had asked Ilya whether Shane’s on-ice performance correlated to his in-bedroom performance, Ilya had given him a stare so withering the entire room had gone silent before asking if he questioned all athletes about their private lives with their spouses or just the ones he liked mocking.
Erin the PR person had ended questions about half a second later, looking professionally furious, and none of the Centaurs had ever seen that reporter again.
———
Ilya had been in the shower for over an hour, and Shane wasn’t fretting about it. He also wasn’t fretting over the fact that Ilya had taken Anya for a forty-five minute run soon after waking up without doing more than shouting goodbye as he headed out the door, or the fact that he’d woken up in the middle of the night to find Ilya on the couch, staring at some spy movie from the 90s.
He was, however, putting together IKEA furniture about it. Last time Hayden, Jackie, and the kids had visited, he’d promised Jade and Ruby bunk beds, so this was a perfectly valid use of his time and energy.
“You know you can pay someone to come do that,” said Ilya from the doorway, and Shane had been so absorbed in sorting screws that he jumped. Ilya half-smiled. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding particularly sorry.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Oh, really?”
Shane didn’t say any of the first five things that came to mind. Instead, he finally went with, “You have a good run?”
“Was fine,” Ilya said, shrugging. For a long moment he looked over Shane’s project, scattered around him on the floor, like he was trying to think of what to say. “I saw a snake crossing the road.”
“What kind?”
“Black. It left before I could get a good look.”
Another one of those silences, and Shane had to grind his teeth together to keep himself from asking are you okay or what can I do or any of the thousand inane questions practically begging to get out when Ilya was like this: a little spacey, not quite there but always seeming like he was about to say something that didn’t materialize, his usual sparkle dulled. Shane would’ve given anything to fix it and knew he couldn’t.
“I am going to go read by the pool, you are good up here?”
“I’m something,” Shane said, glancing at his pile of IKEA parts. “You want company?”
“Maybe in a while,” Ilya said, and then he was gone.
Shane rested his forehead on a box and tried to breathe deeply to settle his nerves, but the smell of cardboard didn’t do shit.
———
The summer after Shane’s first year in Ottawa, they’d gotten into a spectacular blowout fight their third day at the cabin. He couldn’t even remember what the fight had been about, only that he’d been furious and devastated and terrified that this time, it was unfixable. After what felt like hours of shouting the only thing he could think of to do was grab the car keys and leave.
He’d thought about driving back to Ottawa and leaving Ilya stranded there. He remembered thinking that it would serve Ilya right, even if he couldn’t remember what for, but instead he drove around the countryside for an hour. When he came home Ilya was curled up on a deck lounger, hair damp, staring at the water.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and sat next to Ilya, on the edge of the chair, a question. An olive branch. “I came back.”
“I knew you would,” Ilya said, and uncurled until there was a Shane-sized space next to him.
Shane went. He nestled his head against Ilya’s shoulder and tangled their fingers together and still, somehow, didn’t know what to say. He knew he needed to give Ilya a better apology. He knew that they needed to talk and keep talking, that they’d fallen into their old patterns of bottling their feelings up until they exploded. It wouldn’t be easy, but what was?
“I shouldn’t have left,” he finally said. “Sorry.”
“I think maybe it was good,” Ilya said slowly. “You came back less mad.”
“Yeah, but,” Shane said, and didn’t know the rest of the sentence. Ilya was right. Shit.
“I don’t know how to do this, Shane,” Ilya said, softly, and Shane froze, because what the fuck did that mean?
“Do what?” he finally asked.
“Be married,” Ilya said, voice still slow and soft and relaxed, somehow cutting through Shane’s panic bells. “Be married to you.”
“Okay,” Shane said, very sure he’d never breathed in his life.
“So we will have to figure it out together.”
Shane tilted his head against Ilya’s shoulder and willed the panic bells away, and they were going to have to talk about leading with the together part in the future, but that was later.
“As long as it’s together,” he said, and squeezed Ilya’s fingers in his, and watched the sun lower toward the lake, and tried to organize his tornado of thoughts and feelings into something like order.
But mostly he was quietly grateful that they got to start from here, their fingers tangled together, Ilya’s breath ruffling Shane’s hair, Shane idly twisting Ilya’s wedding ring. They got to start from together, from Shane always coming back and Ilya always knowing he would.
———
That first year of Ottawa and marriage had been… hard. Going there felt like starting over: a new team, a new city, a new spouse, a new level of media attention. He and Ilya went from hardly seeing each other to being together constantly, from keeping each other a decade-long secret to being so suddenly, jarringly public that Shane felt flipped inside-out. Suddenly he was a gay hockey player, a gay role model, a gay professional athlete, and he wanted to do a good job at all those things because he knew exactly how much it mattered, and he also wished no one gave a fuck. There were days he’d have given anything to go back to keeping Ilya a secret, and he hated himself for feeling that way.
But there was hockey to play, and since it was more than just Montreal who thought he’d fucked up on purpose in the playoffs, Shane had plenty to prove. He put his head down and worked through it, game after game, and if things were tense with Ilya or he was frustrated with the team or if he missed his old life and couldn’t tell anyone because he was supposed to be so blissfully happy in his new one, he got through it. He got through it all the way to a devastating flameout in the semifinals, and suddenly, there was no hockey to think about instead of his feelings.
———
Shane lasted forty-five minutes of slotting bed parts together and fucking around with an allen wrench while trying not to worry about Ilya before abandoning the bunk beds and heading down. He knew that this pattern repeated itself every year: coming to the cabin after the season felt like falling off a cliff or slamming into a wall, and everything that they’d pushed down bubbled to the surface. Every year, Ilya spiraled back into depression for a few days, going quiet and looking like a ghost and moving at three-quarters speed. Every year, Shane practically exploded with manic, nervous energy and wound up inventing projects to keep himself occupied and from asking Ilya how he was feeling every five seconds, whether he thought his meds were still working or if he wanted to try a different one, if maybe he’d tried meditating or journalling or affirmations, or suggesting he give Dr. Mochalina a call or maybe Svetlana, would it help to speak in Russian for a while? He knew it helped, sometimes. Maybe phototherapy? He’d read an article.
Ilya was by the pool, on a double lounger in the shade, his kindle face-down on his lap, and Shane thought he was asleep until he scooted over to make space.
“Hey,” Shane said.
“Hey,” Ilya said, and he smiled a little, but he sounded distant and looked distant and Shane had to bite his lip before he offered to go personally bring down the moon if it would make Ilya feel one percent better. Instead Shane slid his arm around Ilya’s shoulders, pulling him in, and Ilya went without protesting.
“Should I stay, or do you want to be alone again?” Shane asked, a while later, when he thought he might fall asleep. Ilya was quiet so long that Shane thought he was asleep, his voice slow and dreamy when he finally spoke.
“Stay,” he said, and half-turned toward Shane, burrowing in a little. “Is nice.”
He was right.
———
A few mornings later, Shane was wearing cat-patterned pajama pants and nothing else while and loading strawberries into the blender when Ilya walked into the kitchen in just boxers and wrapped himself around Shane, smashing his face into Shane’s hair.
“Hey,” Shane said, putting the knife down.
“Your hair smells good,” Ilya said, shifting until they fit together, skin on skin, the cross on his necklace pressing into the back of Shane’s neck.
“Thanks. I showered this morning,” Shane explained for some reason.
“Without me?”
“I figured I’d let you sleep.”
“We will have to make up for it later,” Ilya said, nuzzling Shane’s ear. “What are you making?”
“Smoothies,” he said, and grabbed a strawberry, holding it over his shoulder to Ilya’s mouth. “Want one?”
Ilya bit it, leaving Shane holding the stem.
“They’re from the farmer’s market in town,” he said while Ilya chewed.
“Delicious.”
“You sleep well?”
“Yes,” Ilya said, tightening his arm over Shane’s chest, his other hand sliding over Shane’s hips, just above the waistband of the pajama pants he was still wearing. “So quiet and dark here.”
“I’m glad,” Shane said, and turned his head to kiss the underside of Ilya’s jaw, the only thing he could really reach from this angle. “You seem better.”
“Mostly. You know how it goes.”
“Yeah,” Shane said, like he didn’t secretly always worry that this time, Ilya wouldn’t come back out of it. “I do.”
“You know what else helps?” Ilya asked, lips against the shell of Shane’s ear as he toyed with the waistband on Shane’s pajama pants.
“No idea,” Shane said. “Could be anything, really.”
Ilya sighed, warm against Shane’s ear. It made him shiver.
“Why do I put up with you?” he teased, toying with the drawstring.
“I make good smoothies,” Shane said, but his voice had gone rough and he was at least three-quarters hard, so he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. “Someone has to feed you a plant once in a while.”
“Hm,” Ilya said, and slid his hand into Shane’s pants. He hadn’t bothered with underwear that morning, and Ilya made a delighted noise about it as he wrapped his big hand around Shane’s dick and gave it a slow, dry stroke.
“So predictable,” he murmured, stroking his thumb over the tip, spreading the wetness over the head.
“You like it,” Shane mumbled, leaning back and pushing his face into what he could reach of Ilya’s neck, Ilya’s bulge extremely apparent against his lower back. “As if you’re not.”
Ilya laughed against his ear and unwrapped himself from Shane for a moment to open the drawer next to them. Then another. Then a cabinet.
“There’s no lube in the kitchen,” Shane said.
“Did we run out?” Ilya asked, thumb sliding over the head again. Shane was pretty sure there was a wet spot on the front of his pants and didn’t care.
“We didn’t put any in here so we wouldn’t have sex in the kitchen,” he said, a little breathlessly.
Behind him, Ilya’s chest shook with quiet laughter, and Shane couldn’t help but join in.
“Is it working?” Ilya asked.
“Hasn’t yet,” Shane said. “Who knows, maybe tomorrow.”
Ilya turned them so he was leaning against the counter, left arm still wrapped around Shane’s chest, gently stroking Shane’s dick in a way that made Shane feel all melty and weightless.
“We have olive oil,” Ilya said.
“No.”
“Butter?”
“Do not put butter on my dick.”
“I am offering helpful solutions.” Ilya smeared more precum around the head of Shane’s dick, and Shane mindlessly rolled his hips, a noise escaping his throat.
“There’s lube. Um,” Shane said started, and swallowed, voice getting frayed. “In the den.”
“Too far,” Ilya said, took his hand off Shane, and spit into his palm. Shane wrinkled his nose and then bit his lip half a second later when Ilya got his hand back around his dick.
It didn’t take long for Ilya to get him off in slow, sure strokes, and Shane let himself go boneless against Ilya’s chest, one arm wrapped around him until he gasped and spilled into Ilya’s fist, still in his pants.
Neither of them moved right away. Shane felt like his brain was floating somewhere over his head, a little sex-drunk and wrapped in Ilya, maybe the most comfortable place in the world.
Finally Ilya pulled his hand out of Shane’s pants and wiped it on Shane’s thigh, which was gross, and then wrapped his still-sticky hand around Shane’s waist and pulled him even closer, and Shane couldn’t gather the willpower to point out that there was a sink right there.
“Sweetheart,” Ilya said, in Russian, and Shane blinked.
“Mmm?”
Ilya’s arms got tighter, one thumb moving idly over Shane’s ribs, a habit he had when he was thinking.
“I love you,” Ilya went on, the Russian careful, for Shane. “And I’d do anything to keep this. I wish I didn’t drift off like that sometimes. I wish I knew how to be better.”
Shane put one hand over Ilya’s, locking his fingers over his husband’s while he cobbled together what he was trying to say.
“I like you as this,” he managed. “I am not—wanting you…otherwise.”
Ilya sighed and squeezed his fingers.
“I do,” Shane said in English. “I’m not waiting for you to be different. I love you already. I hate that you feel miserable sometimes but I don’t love you less. I just wish I could help.”
“You do,” Ilya said, still in Russian.
Shane was working on it, truly; not on fixing Ilya but on accepting that he couldn’t. His therapist Nick’s second favorite thing to say to Shane was do you think that might be a control fallacy? about whatever was bothering him that month—Ilya’s mood, losing hockey games, his mom’s cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. And he was really, really trying, but he still had the voice in the back of his head that told him if you were a better husband/son/teammate this wouldn’t happen. The best he could do was ignore it.
(Nick’s number one favorite thing to tell Shane was remember, you can’t win at therapy, which Shane wished he would stop saying. Of course he couldn’t win at therapy, he was just trying to improve so it would be as effective as possible.)
“I am going to go shower,” Ilya said eventually, dropping a kiss on the side of Shane’s head. “If you are interested in joining me.”
“I’ll be there up in a minute,” Shane said, glancing down at the handprint on his pants. “Let me put this away so Anya doesn’t help herself.”
“Yogurt fiend,” Ilya said fondly, unwrapping himself and walking out of the kitchen. Shane turned back to the counter and tried not to feel too gross.
“Bring the smoothies, I am starving,” Ilya shouted from halfway up the stairs, and Shane rolled his eyes, but he took the smoothies with him when he followed.
———
It rained and rained, and even though Shane had had grand plans of kayaking and jet skiing and bonfires, he kind of liked the rain, too. Bad weather made it feel okay to loaf around indoors, playing video games and putting together puzzles and reading paperbacks he’d impulse bought at airports and never opened.
He’d just woken up from dozing on a memoir his mom had raved about and wandered into the main part of the cabin, debating whether he felt like going to the effort of making a snack or not. The TV was on, which meant Ilya was there, so he detoured that way instead.
“Hey,” he said, yawning as he stood behind the couch. “Whatcha watching?”
“Cooking show,” Ilya said, tilting his head back toward Shane, who yawned again and sank his fingers into Ilya’s hair. Ilya made a noise. Shane scrunched his fingers. On the TV, the camera was circling around a bunch of… fast food meals on stands? In high-definition closeups? And slow motion?
“Is this more of your food porn?” Shane asked, twisting some curls around his fingers.
“One of them is not cake,” Ilya explained.
“None of them are cake.”
“No, they are all secretly cake except one, and that guy—” he pointed at the screen, where a man in glasses was now frowning, “—has to guess which one is not cake.”
They both went silent, staring intently at the screen as Shane kept dragging his fingers through Ilya’s hair.
“The chicken sandwich,” Shane finally said.
“No way. Is the burger,” Ilya said. “Look at those sesame seeds on the bun. Are you making my hair all fluffy?”
“No,” Shane lied, and Ilya made a disbelieving noise but didn’t tell him to stop, either.
They were both wrong, and the banana split was real. Shane actually gasped when the host cut into the chicken sandwich and there was funfetti on the inside. Ilya grinned up at him.
“See?” he said. “Wait until they have to guess whether the prize money is cake or not.”
Three hours later, they’d demolished a bowl of popcorn and were heatedly debating whether or not a very large rubber duck was made of cake or not. Ilya had one arm around Shane and his left leg half-sprawled over Shane’s knees, who was leaning against his shoulder and pointing out that rubber ducks didn’t have a sheen like that, come on, his thumb drumming against the inside of Ilya’s knee. It was still raining, slow and steady, and with the long northern sunset Shane had no idea what time it was, nor did he care.
“See?” he said, when he was proven right and the host sliced into the duck, revealing chocolate cake. “I told you.”
“Yes, okay, you were right that time,” Ilya said.
“I was mostly right.”
“You were occasionally right.”
And Shane did, in fact, want to recap all the episodes they’d just watched so they could tally up the number of times they’d both been correct because he was pretty sure he’d done better than Ilya, but he’d put a lot of work into his personal growth, so he didn’t.
“What should we make for dinner?” he asked instead.
“Cake,” Ilya said instantly.
“What should it look like?”
“Steak.”
Shane thought about it as the credits rolled.
“I don’t think I could do that,” he finally said.
“Yes. You have to practice,” Ilya explained, as if that needed explanation.
“No, I mean. Like. Ever.”
Ilya shifted so he could look down at him. “Are you admitting there is something you could not do?” he said in mock-surprise, so Shane flipped him off.
“There’s plenty of things I can’t do,” Shane said. “I’ve never touched a musical instrument in my life.”
“You were great on the kazoo at Milo’s birthday party! Don’t sell yourself short,” Ilya said, and Shane groaned at the memory. Whose idea was it to give small children kazoos?
“That was the pinnacle of my music career,” he said.
“I think I could make a steak cake,” Ilya said.
“You could not.”
“Not today,” Ilya said. “In a few months or something. I could practice and make a very good cake that looked like steak.”
Shane narrowed his eyes at him, thinking.
“What?” Ilya finally asked.
“I should hold you to that,” Shane said. “When was the last time you baked anything?”
“I made you a birthday cake last year! Or did you forget?”
“Of course not,” Shane huffed, and leaned into Ilya again. “Fine. That was a good cake.”
“It was a very good cake,” Ilya corrected. And yeah, it had been from a box mix and had made the oven smoke and the decorations clearly hadn’t lived up to Ilya’s original vision, whatever that had been, but Shane would rather have laid on hot coals than insult Ilya’s birthday cake. He’d stayed up late in the middle of playoffs to make it, and it had been perfect and beautiful and one of the best things Shane had ever eaten.
He didn’t think Ilya could make a cake that looked like a steak, though.
“It was the best cake,” Shane agreed, yawning. “Is there still leftover soup?”
———
Shane woke up to a sound like a bomb going off and something hurtling, full-force, into bed and landing on his stomach.
“What the fuck,” he gasped, right as Ilya snorted awake next to him, mumbling out bleary Russian as Anya whined and shoved her nose into his neck.
“Ow,” Shane said, and was about to complain some more when the bedroom lit up white-blue with a sound like the sky was splitting in half, and they all jumped.
“Shit,” Shane said, sitting up and very, very awake. “Wow.”
“Was close,” Ilya said, propping himself up on one elbow as Anya actively tried to burrow into his armpit. “Vse khorosho, Anyechka. Shhh.”
“Hey, girl,” Shane added, reaching out to scratch her ears. In return, he got the world’s most pathetic puppy face. “It’s just a storm.”
“We did not leave anything outside, did we?” Ilya asked.
“Too late now if we did,” Shane said. It was so dark he could barely see, every lightning flash frying his retinas back into blindness, the rain a low roar on the roof and windows. He really, really hoped there were no leaks and stared out the wall of windows past the foot of the bed, trying to remember if he’d left any open.
“Did you close the—”
“Yes.”
“You have no idea what I was going to ask,” Shane said as Ilya sat up next to him, Anya in his arms.
“You were going to ask if I closed a window, and the answer is yes, because I checked all the windows before I came to bed,” Ilya said, and lightning flashed again just in time for Shane to see how smug he looked about it.
“Thanks,” Shane said dryly, after the thunder, leaning in to ruffle Anya’s ears agin. “Anya, when did your papa get so responsible?”
“You do not have to sound so surprised,” Ilya teased.
“I don’t sound surprised, I sound impressed.”
“Hm.”
Shane shoved his pillows against the headboard, leaned into them, and pulled Ilya against his chest, still babytalking to Anya in Russian. One side of his hair was sticking up from the pillow, and something about it made Shane impossibly fond of this secret, warm, rumpled Ilya.
Then lightning struck the surface of the lake, maybe a hundred yards from the dock, the sound of it like the sky being split open. They both jumped.
“Holy shit,” Shane said, just as Ilya said “Jesus Christ!” one hand grabbing Shane’s forearm where it was tight across his chest. Anya whined the world’s most pathetic whine.
“I thought lightning was supposed to strike high things,” Ilya said after a moment, redoubling his dog-petting efforts. “That was not high.”
“I don’t know the lightning rules,” Shane said.
“Isn’t striking high things the point?”
There was another blinding flash and a thunderclap that rattled Shane’s teeth. He didn’t like seeing the lightning and he liked it even less when he couldn’t see it, the nagging worry somewhere in the back of his mind that it had struck the house or started a fire. Normally, Shane didn’t mind storms, but normally, they weren’t like this.
“What are you supposed to do if you get struck by lightning?” Ilya asked after another strike that made them both flinch. Anya whimpered in his arms, and he pressed his face to the top of her head, murmuring something in Russian.
“No idea,” Shane said, heart pounding. “Call 911 if you survive, I guess. Which happens sometimes.”
“Sometimes?” Ilya asked, a hint of a smile in his voice. “Anya, your dad is not making me feel better.”
“It almost never happens,” Shane pointed out. Another flash, a boom, Ilya going rigid under his arm, not that Shane was doing any better. “That’s why they compare rare stuff to lightning strikes. Like shark attacks.”
Anya chose that moment to wriggle out of Ilya’s arms and defect to Shane, who let Ilya go to cuddle her and even let her lick his face once.
“Traitor,” Ilya said, leaning in to scratch her head some more.
“I’m a calming presence,” Shane said, and Ilya had the nerve to laugh out loud. “Hey.”
Ilya just kissed the side of his head and said something in Russian Shane couldn’t hear over the thunder.
“We’re okay,” Shane explained to Anya instead. “The cabin has lightning rods, and lightning is supposed to strike the highest point, which means we… won’t get struck.”
“Stop telling this poor puppy inaccurate lightning facts,” Ilya said, then went on in Russian. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, my sweet little jellybean chocolate tart.” At least, Shane thought that was what he said; he’d never gotten the hang of Russian diminutives no matter how much Ilya tried to explain them, and half the desserts Ilya called her Shane had never heard of.
“And thunder is just noise, it can’t hurt you,” Shane said. “It’s just… air? That the lightning makes really hot?”
Ilya was trying not to laugh while he told Anya she was the world’s puppiest babiest crunchiest cupcake, or something. Shane couldn’t always follow the ridiculous things Ilya said to her, but he wrapped himself around Shane’s back and leaned over Shane’s shoulder to keep saying them while Anya made pathetic faces and, Shane was pretty sure, secretly enjoyed every second they let her stay on the bed.
“You have goosebumps,” Ilya said, dragging a fingertip from Shane’s neck to his shoulder, a few minutes later. The lightning and thunder were getting further away, little by little. Anya had stopped shaking.
He had more goosebumps, now.
“It’s,” Shane started, but it wasn’t cold. “The storm,” he finally finished.
“Because you like it?” Ilya asked, and now it was his mouth instead of his fingertips, a blaze of sweet, soft heat on his skin. Shane closed his eyes. It didn’t make much of a difference in what he could see. “Is dangerous. And exciting.”
“Your favorite things.”
“Not quite,” Ilya said, and that was the subtle sting of Ilya’s teeth on the cords of his neck as Shane tilted his head. He reached out and slid his hand along the inside of Ilya’s thigh, all hot, soft skin and hard muscle. Shane dug his fingers in, because he could, because he was allowed and it was his, because he wanted to feel Ilya’s sharp inhale against his wet skin.
Then Anya shifted in his lap, and he froze. Right. Shane cleared his throat, and Anya looked at him reproachfully.
“Hi,” he said. “You feeling better?”
Ilya reached around him to scratch behind her ears until Anya laid her head down again. She was too big to be a lap dog, but liked to try anyway.
“I think she has calmed down,” he said, chin resting on Shane’s shoulder. “Unlike you.”
Shane pinched the inside of Ilya’s thigh exactly hard enough to make him yelp.
“I forgot she was there,” he grumbled. “Sorry,” he told Anya.
“I think she has seen worse.”
She’d definitely seen more, but Shane had no desire to follow that conversational path, so instead he said, “Did we bring the puppy squeezer from home?”
“No, but we bought one to keep here,” Ilya said, then went on in Russian, “Do you need squeezing, creamy puppy puff?”
Okay, there was no way Shane translated that one right, but it was beside the point.
“Do you know where it is?”
“Maybe,” Ilya said, and got off the bed to go search several closets for Anya’s thunder shirt.
“Cockblock,” Shane murmured to Anya, scratching her ears, and then he felt bad so he let her lick his chin, exactly once, before Ilya called her name from the other room and she yawned and stretched and went to see what he wanted.
Lightning flashed again, bright as ever, and Shane counted the seconds until the thunder. The storm was moving away, at least; he probably didn’t need to worry about what they’d take if they had to leave the house in a hurry. Over the rain, he could barely hear Ilya still talking to Anya in soothing Russian, so she was probably back in her own bed in the corner by the fireplace.
Shane did some quick calculations, kicked the sheets off, and grabbed the lube out of the bedside table. He was mid-stroke, already leaking, when Ilya started talking from the hall outside the bedroom.
“Was in that box of her toys in the coat closet,” he was saying, voice getting nearer. “I think she will be okay, the storm is—”
He stopped in the doorway and Shane looked over at his vague outline, pushing his hips up into his slick fist.
“You were so impatient you started without me?” Ilya said, and then his weight was on the bed, between Shane's legs, pushing his thighs apart.
“I wanted to make sure you didn’t go back to sleep,” Shane said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.
“You thought,” Ilya said, pulling Shane down the bed until he was flat on his back, legs around Ilya’s hips, “I was going to fall back asleep?”
His cock slid alongside Shane’s, hot and hard, and Shane got his hand around it, stroking them together. It was dark and he’d accidentally used way too much lube and the slide of skin on skin felt like he was dreaming.
“There was the time you fell asleep while I was—” Shane started, but then Ilya dropped his head and bit his shoulder. “Ow.”
“Was during playoffs,” Ilya mumbled, and kissed him. It was slow and filthy and Ilya moaned into his mouth when he twisted his fist. Within minutes Shane had one leg over Ilya’s shoulder, the other still wrapped around his waist, Ilya’s knees under his hips as he rubbed slick fingertips over his hole.
“Tell me what you want, since you were too eager to wait,” he purred, and Shane went red in the dark but it didn’t matter.
“I want you to skip that part,” he said.
Ilya looked up, his other hand tightening on Shane’s thigh against his chest. All Shane could see was dark eyes, parted lips, a wild halo silhouetted against the windows.
“You are sure?” he asked, voice rough as thunder, his thumb still pressing against Shane’s rim.
“Yeah. Just go slow,” Shane said.
“You will tell me if—”
“Are you gonna fuck me or not?” Shane asked, giving himself a long, slow stroke, sliding his thumb over the tip. A drop of precum trickled over his knuckles, and he let a noise escape him.
“Jesus fuck,” Ilya whispered, scrabbling through the sheets for the lube. “Where the fuck is—”
Shane heard the sharp snap of the lube opening and a second later, Ilya’s hand closed around his wrist, pulling it down.
“No touching,” he said.
“Is that a y—ahh, shit,” Shane hissed, a drizzle of cold lube straight from the bottle hitting him.
“You can be impatient or the lube can be warm.”
“Then hurry up.”
Ilya didn’t. He poured what felt like half a bottle of lube onto Shane and traced the slick, hot head of his cock along the underside of Shane’s, over his tight balls, rubbed it against the sensitive skin behind them until Shane was grabbing at Ilya’s knees, under his hips, stupid, obscene noises coming out of his mouth.
“Listen to you,” Ilya purred, finally pressing against Shane’s hole. Shane arched up, into it, tightening his leg over Ilya’s shoulder.
“I’d sound better if you were fucking m—” Shane broke off into an animal noise as Ilya finally pressed in, slow and certain, the familiar stretch suddenly overwhelming him. “God. Fuck. Ilya.”
“You are good?” Ilya said, the strain already in his voice.
“Good,” Shane gasped. Ilya slid a little deeper and it made Shane bite his lip and tighten his grip on Ilya’s knee, but it was exactly what he wanted. “Really good,” he managed.
Sometimes, sometimes, Shane wanted to be worked open on Ilya’s dick. Normally he liked it slower, liked the buildup, the teasing, but every so often he wanted it like this: a little rougher, a little faster, more of everything in a way he didn’t always like but that he sometimes craved.
“Sweetheart,” Ilya murmured, working himself in. “So easy for it.”
“Just for you,” Shane managed, writhing against Ilya because it was a lot, too much, not quite enough, heat slicing up his spine. “Only y—holy fuck, Ilya.”
In the dark, Ilya leaned over him, planting one hand on the headboard, his other wrapped around Shane’s thigh as he adjusted, nudging the head of his dick over Shane’s prostate again. Shane let out a noise somewhere between a whimper and a sob.
“That?” Ilya asked, voice a warm rumble in the dark, like he didn’t fucking know.
“Yes, that,” Shane got out. “Do that—Jesus, Ilya. God. I love your dick.”
Ilya’s hand went tighter around Shane’s thigh, and Shane could hear him swallow, even over the noise of the storm.
“Tell me,” he said, and started a slow, hard grind that made Shane feel like he was going insane.
“I love you,” he said. “I love how good you are at this. I love that you’re so—how you are.” Shane bit his lip and braced himself against the headboard with one arm, the other still digging into Ilya’s knee.
“Good at what?”
“Fucking me.”
Even after all these years, it was easier in the dark. He loved watching Ilya while they fucked but this was good, too, having to navigate by touch. Easier to babble all the nonsense that was unflinchingly true and still so hard to say in the daylight.
Ilya swore in Russian, rough and familiar and perfect, and he said, “All yours, what it was made for,” Shane was pretty sure.
He let go of Shane’s thigh to rub the pad of his thumb along Shane’s sensitive rim, right where they were joined, sending shivers over Shane’s skin. Shane let out a moan and arched again, mindless with the combination of soft drag and constant, slow pulse.
“Keep talking,” Ilya said, right above him and practically invisible. He sounded wrecked. “I want to hear it.”
“Keep touching me like that,” Shane ground out as Ilya slid his thumb along his rim again, and this time he shuddered. Ilya sucked in a breath. “It’s good.”
“You used to not like it.”
“I know. It used to be too—” Shane broke off as Ilya shifted his angle and rolled his hips and it was slow and hard and deep just as lightning crackled again, further away now but plenty close enough to light up the room: Ilya above him, wide-eyed and wild-haired and flushed. Shane felt his attention like an electric shock.
“Too much?” Ilya asked, everything dark again.
“Too sweet,” Shane whispered as Ilya slid in again, his thumb pressing down with the slightest pressure. “God, Ilya—”
“I like being sweet to you,” Ilya murmured, moving a little faster, a little harder. “You should get—fuck.”
“Come on,” Shane gasped, grinding down.
“You deserve all the sweetness,” Ilya said, switching to breathless, rapid-fire Russian. “My sweet, filthy, perfect Shane. You’re so good like this, when you—"
Shane whimpered and lost track of the Russian as Ilya pressed in deep, grabbing at the sheets like they could offer leverage, sinking his fingers into Ilya’s thighs.
Sometimes he could come from just this, but it wasn’t going to happen this time for whatever reason—it was low tide or the moon was in the wrong quadrant, who knew, but that meant this might last forever, the sharp crackle of static washing over him, so much but not quite, not quite, oh God.
“No touching,” Ilya growled, still in Russian.
“Then go faster.”
“But this is so good,” Ilya said, and Shane could feel the tension humming through him, the tremble of holding back. “I could listen to you moan with my dick inside you forever.”
“Don’t.”
“I love it when you’re like this,” Ilya said. “When you let go. When you’re—”
Ilya broke off, a hand around Shane’s hip as he drove in, a broken noise escaping his throat.
“When I’m your desperate slut?” Shane ground out.
Ilya shuddered, gasping. “Fuck, Shane, yes.” An audible swallow. “Can you come?”
“Almost,” Shane gasped. “Just—”
Ilya wrapped his hand around Shane and stroked, pounding into him, until Shane whimpered his name and came in hard, hot bursts that hit Ilya’s chest and his own. Moments later Ilya dropped to his forearms and put his face in Shane’s neck, babbling in rough, filthy Russian, sank himself deep, and came inside Shane.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Lightning flashed, far away now, the thunder a distant rumble. Shane wrapped his arms around Ilya and slid his fingers up and down his sweaty spine, hot breath and rough stubble against his neck. He was heavy but he could feel Ilya breathing, the thump of his heart, and it felt like a secret world meant for no one but them.
“I like when you are impatient,” Ilya finally said, without moving, lips against the curve of Shane’s neck.
“You like me all the time,” Shane said, and he could feel Ilya’s smile.
“I think we need to change the sheets,” Ilya mumbled, then eased himself off Shane and tumbled to one side, still half-wrapped together.
“I think we might need a new mattress,” Shane said. He didn’t open his eyes.
“That good?” Ilya teased, and Shane made a face.
“That much lube,” Shane said, and finally turned his head. “Did you use the whole bottle?”
“Was already half-gone when I got here,” Ilya huffed. “I put a dog to bed and next thing I know, you are getting yourself off in a puddle—”
“There wasn’t a puddle until you apparently unscrewed the cap and dumped the whole thing on me.”
Ilya sighed in the dark and pulled Shane closer.
“Was not the whole thing,” he said, and kissed Shane’s nose. “But this is why I keep saying we should buy the fifty-five gallon drum. Would be practical.”
“Those are for porn sets, you know,” Shane said, returning the kiss on Ilya’s nose.
“We could make porn,” Ilya pointed out. “I think you would like watching it.”
Shane wrinkled his nose and didn’t say anything. He kind of suspected Ilya was right, but wasn’t ready to admit it.
“We should go shower,” he said instead. “You coming?”
———
“Also, the last time you tried fucking me was with a rubber dick,” Ilya said, materializing with no warning behind Shane as if he was continuing a conversation and not bringing up rubber dicks out of nowhere.
“Did you eat the last of the grapes?” Shane asked, shoving containers out of the way in the fridge, because Ilya had a knack for eating almost all of a dish and then sticking the final three bites behind something else for Shane to find weeks later, when it was in danger of walking on its own. “And it was silicone, you can’t sterilize rubber.”
“Okay, the last time you fucked me it was with a silicone dick several years ago, and anyway I am more into it now,” Ilya said. “I think they are in that drawer on the bottom.”
“I already looked there,” Shane said, but he opened the drawer again because that was how relationships worked, it turned out. “No grapes.”
“They are right there!”
They were not.
“In that container with the red lid,” Ilya went on. “Next to the—yes, that one.”
“This is grapes?” Shane asked, because it was clearly not the grape container.
“Yes,” Ilya said, the only person in the world who could sound obnoxiously patient. “I know this because I put grapes into it yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Shane, who’d opened the container to find a bunch of grapes already washed and taken off the stem, and someday he was going to stop being surprised by all the tiny ways Ilya loved him, but apparently not today. “Thanks.”
He popped a grape into his mouth, then held the container out to Ilya, who took a handful, leaning against the counter.
“If you do not want to—”
“That’s not it,” Shane said quickly. Ilya raised an eyebrow and popped a grape into his mouth. “That part is totally fine.”
“Fine,” Ilya repeated flatly.
“No. I mean, it sounds good,” Shane said, face heating. It was unfair as hell, honestly, that Ilya could walk into the kitchen and say so how about fucking me that casually and here he was, getting awkward over that sounds good. “But, just so you know, you don’t have to.”
Ilya grabbed another handful of grapes and ate one, watching Shane like he knew he wasn’t finished speaking, which, goddamn it.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Shane said, and now he was definitely bright red because he was who he was and maybe he should just accept it. “I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, or like our relationship is somehow unequal, or like there’s anything wrong, or like you need to do this to prove that we’re even or you can be vulnerable or whatever.”
Shane was, secretly, wondering if Ilya had gotten this idea from therapy, or a podcast, or one of the self-help-type audiobooks he pretended he didn’t listen to. It happened sometimes. It had never been about exactly before, but Ilya had definitely, like, started pointing out heteronormativity or toxic masculinity when they watched movies, so Shane could never tell.
“You think I am asking you to fuck me because I think I should want that. For some not-sexy reason,” Ilya said slowly. He looked very skeptical.
“I’m overthinking it, right?”
But instead of grinning and teasing Shane, like he was expecting, Ilya bit his lip and looked away, suddenly pensive and thoughtful, and ah yes, there was the anxiety.
“Shane,” Ilya said, softly. “Do you want to know the real reason I want you to fuck me? That I have never told anyone before?”
“Yes. Of course,” Shane said, stepping between Ilya’s legs and tangling their fingers together, raising their joined hands to kiss Ilya’s knuckles.
Ilya took Shane’s face in his other hand, smoothing his thumb over his cheekbone. Shane tried not to look as alarmed as he felt.
“I think,” Ilya finally said, staring deep into Shane’s eyes. “That it would be hot to get railed by my husband.”
Shane was honestly going to kill him one day.
“It’s okay, I guess,” he managed to say with a straight face and a shrug.
“You are such a dick to me sometimes,” Ilya said softly, his hand still on Shane’s face, and Shane finally cracked up.
———
Years ago, Shane hadn’t been into the idea of fucking Ilya. He’d never really enjoyed fucking someone and he loved getting fucked, and they were both perfectly happy with the way things were, so why mess with success?
But also, years ago, Shane hadn’t known how to say on your knees in Russian and hadn’t known how fast Ilya would do it. He hadn’t realized how much he would like the look on Ilya’s face when Shane shoved him onto the bed and rode him until he was shouting for saints Shane had never heard of.
Years ago, they’d never gotten a shutout against Montreal at their home opener. Shane had never patiently waited through thirty minutes and two beers at the hotel bar before practically dragging Ilya back to their room, stripping him without bothering to turn the lights on, and fucking him between the thighs so hard they’d both been a little surprised. Shane had learned a lot over the years, including just how much he liked watching Ilya turn into an incoherent, desperate mess.
So, yes. Shane thought it would probably be hot to rail his husband.
———
Being who he was, he still spent several hours secretly googling things like first time topping tips anal. He didn’t learn a single thing he didn’t already know, but the due diligence made him less anxious.
———
On the screen, a dark-haired man wearing some sort of metal-looking suit crashed into a building, then slid down until he was on the ground. Another dark-haired man walked up and towered over him menacingly.
“I thought they were on the same team,” Shane said, looking up from his phone where he’d been texting Rose.
Ilya’s head pressed against his shoulder as he looked at the TV, his own phone glowing in his hand.
“The guy who is standing was a spy who was secretly taking Team Sunshine’s nanotechnology back to the bad guys so they can use it in the laser that is going to destroy the moon,” he explained.
Shane blinked.
“They’re trying to destroy the moon?” he asked. Fuck, he’d been paying even less attention than he thought.
“Yes. Obviously,” Ilya said, and he sounded so smug about it that Shane was suspicious. “You cannot follow a very simple plot?”
Shane sighed and wriggled a little more upright. They were both sprawled on the huge sectional in the den: Shane upright with his feet on the ottoman, and Ilya leaning against him, Shane’s arm over one shoulder and draped over his chest. Somehow, he was taking up the rest of the couch.
“Most of this movie has been people quietly talking in a conference room,” Shane grumbled. “How is this—okay, that’s cheating,” he said, when Ilya’s phone lit up with a text. “You just got Hayes to explain it to you.”
Ilya just shrugged and opened his texts, where Hayes had sent several emojis and a gif.
“He is much better at telling the story than the movie,” Ilya said. “We should just ask him to summarize the rest.”
“No. I’m being supportive,” Shane insisted.
“Rose is not even in this movie.”
“She has a cameo,” Shane said as Ilya adjusted his position, which made his shirt ride up a little. Shane flattened his palm against Ilya’s stomach and glanced down for no reason.
“Did we miss it?”
“I think it’s at the end,” Shane admitted.
“What if we looked up just that scene on the internet?” Ilya offered. “No one will know.”
“This is probably important back story,” Shane said stubbornly. “The premiere’s in three weeks, we can’t just go and not know what happens. We’ll be lost.”
Rose had invited both of them to the premiere of the fifth Team Sunshine movie, Solar Flare, as her dates, and apparently no one had told her she couldn’t. She and Ilya already had an extensive text chain about their red carpet outfits, while Shane wished several times a day that he could back out. Mostly, he didn’t because Ilya was so excited.
“Hollander,” Ilya said. “Do you think someone is going to quiz you on the plot points of the first four movies?”
Kind of. “No,” Shane muttered. “I just want to be well-informed.”
On screen, the guy who Shane was ninety percent sure was the main character ran through a thunderstorm, scaling a chain-link fence and coming to a stop in front of a sign that said Darkbat Laboratories. He was wearing a white shirt rendered pointless by the rain.
“I figured out why you want to watch the whole movie,” Ilya teased. “You just think he is hot.”
Shane could feel his face heat and didn’t bother fighting it. He was a lost cause. “You don’t?”
“Mm. I am more into the villain’s assistant. With the glasses.” His shirt had ridden up more, and Shane’s fingertips were on bare skin, and now he really wasn’t paying attention to the movie. “Also his girlfriend. Everyone in this movie is hot, why is it so boring?”
The wet man found some sort of subterranean tunnel and began the process of breaking into the laboratory, kicking off what was probably an important plot development, but Shane’s thumb had found the trail of soft hair below Ilya’s belly button, and he was way more interested in the way Ilya’s hips just barely twitched as he toyed with it than in vials of glowing green stuff.
Ilya’s pants had a drawstring, and when Shane wrapped it around his finger, he got a sharp inhale in response.
“Focus, Hollander,” Ilya teased.
“What makes you think I’m not focusing?”
“The fact that you are terrible at multitasking.”
“I’m watching the movie,” Shane said. “What else would I be doing?”
It probably made Shane a bad person that watching Ilya get hornily grumpy did it for him, but Ilya was making a vaguely irritated noise and shifting on the couch, trying to get Shane’s hand closer to his dick without looking like that was what he was doing, so Shane was having a hard time mustering much guilt.
Slowly, he undid the drawstring. He could tell Ilya was trying not to move, but his breathing changed, that familiar hitch in rhythm. Just for fun, he tugged on the drawstring and watched Ilya’s dick swell inside the gray fabric of his pants, and when Shane couldn’t take it any more, he slid his hand down and pressed his palm to the shaft.
Ilya exhaled like he’d been holding his breath, his head relaxing against Shane’s shoulder. He shifted up on the couch to give Shane better access, shirt still riding up, and Shane stroked him through the fabric.
It looked inexplicably filthy, his fist half-closed around Ilya’s dick, the thin material clinging to it. The noise Ilya made was definitely filthy, along with the way he pushed his hips forward looking for more friction that Shane didn’t give him. This wasn’t a position he was in often and he wanted to savor it: getting to watch Ilya as he frayed at the edges while he whispered are you even watching the movie in his ear and not getting much more than a grunt in response.
Soon enough, he slid his hand under the waistband of Ilya’s and stroked him properly, feeling the way Ilya shuddered when he moved his thumb across Ilya’s leaking slit. Soon after that Ilya was lying in his lap, one arm behind his head and his pants stretched around his thighs, watching Shane through heavy-lidded eyes.
Jesus Christ, he was spectacular. Draped across Shane and the couch, disheveled and breathing hard and flexing his hips in time with Shane’s slow, gentle strokes, cheeks flushed and lips parted. Ilya was shameless, always, but especially like this: wanting and utterly unembarrassed about it. Shane loved that about him. He always had.
“Good?” Shane murmured, pushing his fingers into Ilya’s hair and watching Ilya’s eyes close as he did. All he got an answer was a long, low groan, but that was easy enough to translate, same as the way Ilya fucked up into his hand as he tightened his fist, just a little.
He could stay like this forever, probably. He was hard as fuck against Ilya’s shoulder but it could wait for the show to be over, when Ilya would go to his knees and—
Or.
Or.
“You still want me to fuck you?” Shane asked, lightly scratching his nails over Ilya’s scalp. Ilya’s eyes opened and he raised one eyebrow and waited just long enough for Shane to start thinking he really did say that, didn’t he, I didn’t somehow misunderstand—
But then Ilya smiled his stupid beautiful crooked smile and hooked a hand behind Shane’s head and they were kissing, hot and hard, before Ilya broke it to get out of his clothes, roll over and crawl down the couch, until he could reach into the end table for the lube and toss it to Shane, still grinning.
“I was starting to think you would never ask,” he said, adjusting a throw pillow behind his head and splaying himself on the couch with Shane between his legs.
“You really thought I’d turn you down?” Shane asked, on his knees over Ilya. He slid one hand along Ilya’s inner thigh, soft and hot, his dick jutting over his stomach.
Ilya grinned again and wrapped one hand around it, giving himself a slow, hard stroke, tilting his hips up. “I knew you would take your time to say yes. Was less time than I thought.”
Shane rolled his eyes and dug his thumb into a fading bruise on the inside of Ilya’s thigh, a sign that the summer was nearly over and they’d have to abide by rules again.
“What? I am very persuasive,” Ilya said, and Shane couldn’t argue that so he kissed him instead, deep and hard. Ilya took his hand off his dick and Shane rocked them together, still clothed, one hand pushing Ilya’s hip into the mattress. When he left Ilya’s mouth to press kisses along his jaw, scrape his teeth down his neck, Ilya tilted his head back and wrapped one leg around Shane’s hips and made a perfect, guttural noise that went straight to Shane’s dick.
“You like that?” Shane said, lips brushing against Ilya’s ear, and in reply Ilya grabbed his ass and ground them together while Shane sucked a bruise into Ilya’s neck, the last one of the summer. Hockey camps started in a week.
Shane searched around for a second to find the lube—maybe they did need the 55-gallon drum, at least it couldn’t fall into the couch cushions—then slid slick fingers against Ilya’s hole. Ilya tensed the way he always did at first, and Shane kissed his neck and drew gentle circles around his rim until he relaxed.
From there, it was easy. Ilya got his hand back on his dick and swore softly as Shane stroked his prostate with one fingertip, then two. He was flushed and lazy and heavy-lidded, jerking himself slowly. The sight of it gave Shane an odd pang of nostalgia for the first years they’d really been together: the quiet, furtive phone sex, all the times he’d watched Ilya jerk off in a hotel room and wished he could be there.
“More?” he asked, and licked the shell of Ilya’s ear. Ilya swallowed, then nodded. Shane rolled his eyes and bit his earlobe.
“Fuck! Yes,” Ilya finally said, with actual words.
“Thank you,” Shane murmured, and he kissed Ilya’s ear and slid another finger in. It was slick and hot and tight and Ilya inhaled sharply, breath catching, body tensing, and—maybe this had been a bad idea and Ilya didn’t like it after all, which wasn’t even surprising, he’d never wanted it before. Shane opened his mouth to ask if he wanted to stop—
“You’re doing so good,” he heard himself say, voice frayed, and stopped abruptly. Ilya’s eyes went wide, his pupils blown, and for a long moment there was no sound but their harsh breathing and the movie that was apparently still playing. Ilya swallowed hard, throat working.
“Am I?” Ilya purred, and pumped his leaking dick again.
“You are,” Shane said, and nosed along Ilya’s neck. “Just relax, I’ve got you.” Ilya exhaled and his fingers slid into the knuckle and it made Ilya swear and tense again.
“Take a deep breath,” Shane said, pulling back a little. He stroked a thumb over Ilya’s cheek until Ilya opened his eyes. “Come on, there you go. Breathe for me. It’s a lot, I know.”
Ilya relaxed, slowly, until Shane could fuck him gently with his fingers, making sure they look dragged over his prostate with every shallow stroke, keeping up a stream of whatever came to mind. He was half-expecting Ilya to call it off and half-expecting Ilya to want to come like this and not actually get fucked because he was into it now, jerking himself and groaning with his head back and his skin flushed, even fucking down on Shane’s fingers a little.
“Jesus,” Shane whispered, thumbing over a spit-slick nipple. “Look at you.”
“You like it?” Ilya asked, rough and sultry, abs flexing with every stroke.
“What? Yes,” Shane said. It was less sultry.
“Then give me your dick,” Ilya said and right, yes, that had been what they were doing. Shane dipped his head and kissed Ilya as he pulled his fingers out, drawing a small noise from his throat.
“Right,” Shane said. “Let me just—”
Shane Hollander, world-class professional athlete, nearly fell off the couch when he tried to take off his shirt and reach for the drawer in the side table at the same time. He managed to get undressed and then leaned over the couch, nearly pulling the drawer off its track.
“Lube is here,” Ilya said, confused.
“Yeah, are there any—” Shane broke off, shoving around the random crap in the drawer, which included a package of wet wipes, a DVD of Ratatouille, three nearly-empty bottles of various lubes, a bunch of takeout napkins, and a pair of nipple clamps neither of them had really liked. “Aha.”
Ilya raised one eyebrow, one arm behind his head, still idly stroking himself.
“Trust me,” Shane said, settling between Ilya’s thighs again as he ripped the condom open.
“I do.”
Shane bit his lip as he rolled the condom on; it was the first time he’d touched himself and he was throbbingly, achingly hard. Ilya already had the lube and pushed himself up with one hand, sweaty and wild-haired, and he fit their mouths together as he slicked Shane up, Shane’s hips jerking into his hand.
“We’ll stop if you don’t like it,” Shane said, fucking into Ilya’s fist, hand tight around the back of his neck. “Just say the word and—”
“Relax, Hollander,” Ilya said, grinning, and Shane shoved him back onto the couch because he was a shithead.
Shane felt like a teenager again, for a moment, an echo of the feeling he’d had the first time he had sex with a girl. He hadn’t been quite awkward enough to stare down at her and ask so now I just put this in there? but he’d felt a little like there was manual he was supposed to have read and hadn’t.
Except this was Ilya, and if there were a manual Shane would be the author, so he lined himself up and pressed in.
Ilya was warm and tight and Shane had to bite his lip to keep from going too fast, because it was good and Ilya had his eyes closed and his head back and Shane could see his throat working, his hands on Shane’s sides.
“Good?” Shane asked once he was fully sunk in, a feeling like sparks settling at the base of his spine. Ilya’s hands were tight around his waist, fingers digging in, as clear a direction as any.
“Okay,” Ilya said, and Shane didn’t move even though there was a low, animal part of his brain screaming at him to start. Instead he leaned in and planted a wet, open-mouthed kiss on Ilya’s collarbone, his neck, felt Ilya swallow again.
“Breathe,” Shane murmured, and Ilya made a small noise in his throat that made Shane’s hips twitch as he pulled back to look at Ilya’s face. He looked… uncertain. “Tell me.”
“Is… weird,” Ilya said, and he was so—flushed and confused and a little hesitant and fucking adorable that Shane dropped his head to Ilya’s shoulder and started laughing.
“Yeah,” he said, which made Ilya snort and he tightened, a little, and Shane had to bite his lip.
“What? Is useful word,” Ilya said, the laughter still in his voice as Shane looked up.
“You want to stop?”
“No. Is not bad, just weird.”
“Not bad,” Shane said, dryly. “Great.”
He dipped his head and Ilya pushed up to kiss him, sweet and slow and deep. His hand relaxed on Shane’s sides, thumbs moving over the bottom of Shane’s ribcage and without thinking Shane pulled out half an inch and thrust lightly, sparks shooting up his spine, and then did it again at the noise Ilya made.
Ilya relaxed. He started moving with Shane, little noises coming from his throat, and it was better but it wasn’t what Shane wanted. Shane wanted him glassy-eyed and swearing in Russian, wanton and filthy. He pulled out again until just the tip of his dick was inside, angled Ilya’s knee and thrust in again—
“Fuck,” Ilya gasped, his eyes squeezing shut, his hand tightening on his dick and Shane didn’t need directions, just did it again and watched Ilya go pliable underneath him. It was good, the noises Ilya made, the way he rolled his hips up to meet Shane’s but it was a tricky angle and Ilya was somewhere good but he wasn’t there and Shane had never settled for good enough in his life.
“Here,” he said, and pulled out. “Over.”
Ilya went without asking. He knocked half the couch cushions onto the floor and Shane threw the other half somewhere, until he was in the right spot and Shane could press a palm into his lower back while he emptied another fuckton of lube onto himself, then slide in, slow but sure. He paused at the end and dug his thumbs into the muscle on either side of Ilya’s spine and whispered, “Fuck, you look good like this,” without really meaning to.
It was better this way, easier to get the right angle, easier to get a strangled, “Jesus, fuck, Hollander,” out of Ilya as he went onto his forearms.
“You like that, Rozanov?” Shane managed, and got a string of Russian in return. When he hooked his hands around Ilya’s hips to hold him still and maybe pull him back, just a little, because he was making gorgeous choked-off sounds, Ilya reached one hand back and half-tangled his fingers with Shane’s as the muscles in his back knotted and pulled.
Once he was sure he had the rhythm, Shane got a hand on Ilya. He was hard as fuck and dripping and simply said yes as Shane started stroking him, more or less in time with his thrusts.
It didn’t take long, after that; Shane was glad he already knew the Russian word for harder and also the Russian for just like that, don’t stop. Ilya shouted when he came, his dick jerking in Shane’s hand and his hole clenching around Shane’s dick, nothing like Shane had ever felt as he fucked him through it, feeling him go loose and pliable.
“Ilya,” Shane managed, and he felt like he was glowing, molten, heat sliding down his spine. “Holy fuck, Ilya, you’re—”
Ilya yelped and swore in Russian, grabbing at Shane’s hip.
“Stop! Fuck. Stop,” he gasped, and Shane pulled out, gasping. “Sorry. Too much.”
“Can I—”
“Yes. Fuck. Come on,” Ilya said, and flattened himself onto the couch as Shane stripped the condom off, stroked himself, and came all over Ilya’s back.
For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of their breathing and fight noises from the movie they’d abandoned, and then Shane leaned forward to rest his forehead on the knob of Ilya’s neck and let his breathing even out.
“You’re also lying in a puddle, aren’t you,” he said after a minute.
“Yes. I am a cum sandwich,” Ilya said, and Shane made an involuntary noise.
“That’s the grossest thing you’ve ever said.”
Ilya lifted his head and shot him a grin. Shane forgave him.
“Wipe me off so I can roll over and kiss you,” Ilya said, and Shane gave his back one more kiss and then grabbed the wet wipes.
When they’d both cleaned up properly, with soap and water, they got the cushions back on the couch and Ilya pulled Shane into him, back to front, hand splayed over his chest. Shane slid his fingers between Ilya’s.
“Was fun once we figured it out,” Ilya said, his voice buzzing against Shane’s hair.
“You liked it?”
“You had to use like six leather wipes afterward,” Ilya pointed out, because he loved saying things the grossest way possible. Shane sighed.
“Me too,” Shane said, after considering for a minute. “Not as much as—the usual way.”
“You mean getting fucked?” Ilya said, and Shane rolled his eyes, even though Ilya couldn’t see him. “No, but is good to have options.”
On the screen, the credits started rolling, but the remote was across the room and Shane wasn’t interested in moving.
“Did Hazy explain the end?” he asked instead.
“Probably. He was still explaining when you distracted me,” Ilya said as the credits abruptly stopped. They both went silent as a woman in all black ran through some sort of hedge maze, rain pouring down. After a bit, she came to a… trap door? With a face on it? Shane had no idea what was going on, but then she turned and faced the camera.
“Oh, this must be Rose’s cameo,” he said. “We timed that perfectly.”
Ilya snorted. “Is too bad. She could have watched us have sex, like in your fantasy.”
Shane squirmed and sighed and felt his face get hot all at once.
“My fantasy’s not about Rose, that would be weird.”
Ilya just hummed against the back of Shane’s head and pulled him in a little tighter as Rose… pointed at the trap door and blew it off its hinges. A swarm of bees came out, which Rose seemed happy about?
“Thank you,” Ilya said, a little while later, when the credits were rolling again. “I know change makes you anxious.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Shane lied. Ilya kissed his hair. “This one didn’t. Much,” he amended.
“Well, I was right,” Ilya went on, shifting behind Shane like he was burrowing in. “Was hot to get railed by my husband.”
Shane laughed, and raised Ilya’s hand to his lips to kiss his knuckles, and considered getting up so he could grab the remote and turn the TV off, but he didn’t. This was too good.
———
“Maybe I will be a psychic,” Ilya said, fingers drifting through Shane’s hair.
“You can’t just decide to be psychic if you’re not really psychic,” Shane said.
Ilya sighed. “No one is actually psychic, Hollander.”
“Definitely not you.”
“Being a psychic is about reading people,” Ilya explained, thoughtlessly twisting Shane’s hair through his fingers, featherlight little tugs on Shane’s scalp where he had his head in Ilya’s lap, watching the sunset over the lake from the dock. “You wave your hands over a crystal ball and say something like I sense you are worried about a problem that starts with the letter R and then the person is amazed and tells you all their romantic troubles because you read their mind.”
“So after you retire from hockey you’re going to be a con artist?” Shane asked, eyes still closed.
They’d been talking about it more, this year. Ilya had been out for a month with a knee injury, Shane’s shoulder bothered him more mornings than it didn’t, and the rookies looked like children; Shane knew they still had years of hockey ahead of them, but he also knew it wasn’t as many as they had behind.
And—Shane surprised himself by not dreading it. He didn’t like it, that was for sure. Hockey had been his life for almost as long as he could remember, and he loved it, but—it wasn’t the only thing. There was a world out there. There was going to be a next, and Ilya would be there with him, and Shane wasn’t sure what it would be, but he knew it would be good.
“Psychics are not con artists,” Ilya said. “They help people solve their problems. Is like therapy, but magic.”
“You’re getting people to give you money by telling them you can read their minds,” Shane said. “How is that like therapy?”
“How is it not?”
Shane finally opened his eyes just so he could narrow them at Ilya, who was grinning down at him.
“I can tell you what you are thinking right now,” Ilya said, and Shane raised his eyebrows. “You are thinking I would look hot with eyeliner and a crystal ball.”
Shane snorted and shifted on the dock where the wood was digging into his back. “I mean, I am now, but that doesn’t count,” he said. “You gonna wear a caftan too?”
“Would I look hot in one?”
“Probably.”
Ilya hummed in agreement and kept playing with Shane’s hair, the muscles in his thigh gently flexing as he swished his feet through the water. It was their last week at the cabin that summer, their last long span of stillness before hockey camp and training and the preseason and the whole breathless cycle starting again, the only rhythm Shane had known his entire adult life. Strange to think of a summer without that promise at the end.
“I could go to college,” he said.
“You want to do that?”
“Maybe,” Shane said, staring into the sky. “I don’t know.”
Birds flew overhead, the faint clouds turning to orange ripples in the sunset.
“Do you ever think about everything you missed because of hockey?” he asked, because he had been, lately. “Like, I don’t know, frat parties?”
“Is that why you want to go to college?” Ilya asked, then laughed when Shane flicked him on the thigh. “Of course I think about what I missed, but… I also avoided a lot of things.”
Shane turned his head so his cheek was resting on Ilya’s thigh, Ilya’s hand still in his hair. Ilya didn’t elaborate. Shane didn’t need him to.
“I think,” Ilya said slowly, looking down at Shane. “You would have been slutty in college.”
Shane wrinkled his nose, and Ilya laughed.
“On your own for the first time, the way you looked at nineteen?” Ilya went on.
“Like a kid?”
“Like a nice, innocent Canadian boy just waiting to be ravished.”
Shane sighed and pretended he wasn’t blushing.
“Have you and Harris been trading romance novels again?”
“I think there would have been a line around the block wanting to ravish you,” Ilya said, voice dipping lower.
“You have to stop saying ravish.”
“We will agree to disagree.”
Shane shifted on the dock again, dipping one foot into the water.
“Would you have slept with more men?” he asked, because he’d always wondered. It had bothered him, once, how much Ilya seemed to prefer women.
“If not for hockey?” Ilya said. “Probably. But you would still be my favorite.”
“Even after I got ravished by the line around the block?” Shane asked, and Ilya snorted.
“You think I would not have been first in that line?” he said. “Wait, is this why you want to go to college?”
“Yes,” Shane said dryly. “So I can slut it up at frat parties.”
“Such a dick to me sometimes,” Ilya muttered, and Shane laughed. They were silent for a few minutes, Ilya’s fingers still in Shane’s hair, the wispy clouds above going from orange to pink to purple. Another day over, another summer, another year. If he could, Shane would have stopped time, just for a while, but he couldn’t. All he could do was hold on to the good things he had for as long as he had them.
“You know the best thing about hockey?” he said, a long time later, the violet-blue of evening settling over the lake.
“You are very good at it?”
“It gave me you,” he said.
“Oh,” Ilya said, and froze. His eyes widened, and Shane could have sworn he was blushing. “I think that is the most romantic thing you have ever said to me.”
And now everyone was blushing.
“It is not,” Shane said.
“You just said you love me more than hockey.”
“Well.”
Ilya shrugged and looked at the sky but Shane knew the look he got when he was so pleased with something it made him giddy. It always made him feel light as a cloud.
“Hey. C’mere,” he said, sitting up and scooting to sit next to Ilya.
“Yes?”
“I love you more than I love hockey,” Shane said, and kissed him, slow and sweet and gentle, one hand on his face. When they parted for a moment Ilya said it back in Russian, and Shane tried it out, letting the sounds he’d never quite gotten the hang of trip from his tongue, and then they kissed again as the twilight deepened around them.
It felt like the sky clearing. A door opening. Nothing had been wrong before but saying it out loud—realizing that it was true and had been, for so long—made after feel like a promise. Ilya had given him that.
———
When they got back to Ottawa, the cleaners had left a flat cardboard box on the dining room table. Shane frowned at it, because he hadn’t ordered anything.
It was light when he picked it up, and suddenly Shane was afraid he knew what it was.
“What are we going to do with this?” he asked Ilya as we walked into the bedroom where Ilya was haphazardly putting clothes away.
“It came!” Ilya said, and snagged it out of Shane’s hands. “Is perfect.”
Shane sighed and pretended he wasn’t the same color as the foam finger, which read “I <3 Shane Hollander’s dick.” Where the hell did someone get something like that?
“I think we should hang it over the fireplace,” Ilya went on, grinning at his own handiwork. “In the living room.”
Shane just rolled his eyes and grabbed a shirt out of a suitcase.
“Dining room,” Ilya bargained. Shane shot him a look. “Fine, bedroom.” Another look. “Closet?”
Shane sighed, because he knew a good deal when he heard one, honestly.
“Okay,” he said. “The bedroom closet, and you don’t get drunk with Hayes and show it to him.”
“Deal,” Ilya said, crossed the room, and kissed him.